Suchergebnisse

"Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of America leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009." "Howard Bloom has a radically new answer. In The Genius of the Beast, the author of the acclaimed books The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain insists that Western civilization has only begun to realize its full potential. Bloom argues that there's a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It's struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings. "Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race." "The Genius of the Beast takes the reader on a sweeping tour of human history, from the Stone Age to the present. Every chapter conveys a radically new way to see the astonishing mechanism we call Western civilization. Bloom marvels at how humans have turned toxic waste into food and fuel, trash into treasure, and garbage into gold. He shows how we've produced material miracles based on immaterial things - passion, persistence, and fantasy. Bloom shows that what many regard as the end is just the beginning."--BOOK JACKET

The present article introduces a new approach for measuring the impacts of whole-school reforms. The approach is based on "short" interrupted time-series analysis, which has been used to evaluate programs in many fields. The approach is used to measure impacts on three facets of student performance: (a) average (mean) test scores, which summarize impacts on total performance; (b) the distribution of scores across specific ranges, which helps to identify where in the distribution of student performance impacts were experienced; and (c) the variation (standard deviation) of scores, which indicates how the disparity in student performance was affected. To help researchers use the approach, the article lays out its conceptual rationale, describes its statistical procedures, explains how to interpret its findings, indicates its strengths and limitations, and illustrates how it was used to evaluate a major whole-school reform—Accelerated Schools.

This article describes a simple way to assess the statistical power of experimental designs. The approach presented is based on the concept of a minimum detectable effect, which, intuitively, is the smallest true impact that an experiment has a good chance of detecting. The article illustrates how to compute minimum detectable effects and how to apply this concept to the assessment of alternative experimental designs. Applications to impact estimators for both continuous and binary outcome measures are considered

This article presents estimates of program-induced, post-program earnings gains for men and women who enrolled in CETA between January 1975 and June 1976. Data for the analysis were obtained from the Continuous Longitudinal Manpower Survey for CETA participants with corresponding comparison group information for respondents from the March 1976 Current Population Survey. Although subject to methodological limitations, the findings suggest that CETA-sponsored classroom training, on-the-job training, and subsidized work experience noticeably increased the future earnings of female participants, but had virtually no impact for men. Impacts for women were roughly the same for all three program activities and were due primarily to increased employment rather than increased wage rates.

This article presents lessons learned from an innovative employment and training program for dislocated workers—persons who have lost stable, long-term jobs due to changing technology and/or increased international competition. Because the program was conducted as a randomized experiment, it was possible to obtain unbiased estimates of its impact as well as considerable information about its implementation. The article provides specific information about program design and serves as a prototype for how social experimentation can be used by state and local governments. In addition, the article illustrates how qualitative and quantitative information from process and impact analyses can be integrated to provide a richer picture of the program experience than would be possible otherwise.

This article examines how to estimate the effect of a program in the presence of no- shows—persons who are assigned to the program but do not participate. The article briefly discusses the methodological problems involved, describes two current experimental evaluations that are subject to these problems, presents several estimators that overcome these problems, outlines the conditions necessary for these estimators to be feasible, and describes two extensions of the analysis that illustrate a potentially broad range of further applications.